January 02, 2007

Googlefreude, Googleschaden, Schadengoogle...

Lynne
Murphy,
an American expat teaching linguistics at the University of Sussex, runs a
wonderful little blog called Separated by a
Common Language, exploring the differences (often quite subtle)
between American English and British English. She recently held a Word
of the Year contest with three categories: "Most useful import from
American English to British English," "Most useful import from British
English to American English," and "Best word invented by a reader of
this blog." The winner of the first category is the evocative muffin top ('the bulge of flesh
hanging over the top of low-rider jeans,' as defined by the American
Dialect Society in its 2005 WOTY
voting, where it was a runner-up for "Most Creative"). The second
category was won by the pejorative wanker
(and its derivatives), which certainly has been heard more and more
frequently on the left side of the Pond.

The winner of the last category, best word coined by a reader of
SbaCL,
is Googleschaden. This word's
history began when Andrew
Sullivan invented the similar Googlefreude,
defining it on his blog as "the way in which pundits' past
pontifications can now come back to haunt them." When a commenter noted
this coinage on SbaCL, Paul Danon suggested Googleschaden might be more
appropriate, "since that connotes the grief rather than the joy." An
anonymous commenter followed up with Schadengoogle,
"to make the parallel to Schadenfreude
a little clearer." But by then Googleschaden
had already caught on, thanks to a mention
on Sullivan's widely read blog. So Googleschaden
won out, even though Schadengoogle
is a marginally better neologism in my estimation. And I'm still not
convinced Googlefreude was
all that bad anyway.

Part of the problem, I
think,
is with Sullivan's original definition
of Googlefreude, inspired by
a reader digging up a December 2003 post by
Markos "Kos" Moulitsas anointing Howard Dean and Wesley
Clark as the unassailable frontrunners in the Democratic presidential primary. (Kos is attempting a similar
anointment this time around with Barack Obama.) So Googlefreude would seem to evoke
not
so much "the way in which pundits' past
pontifications can now come back to haunt them" but rather "the joy in
exposing a pundit's (poorly predictive) past pontifications." This is not so different from
chuckling over such notoriously bad calls as "I
think there is a world market for maybe five computers" (IBM chairman
Thomas Watson in 1943) or "Guitar groups are on their way out" (Decca
Records exec Dick Rowe rejecting the Beatles in 1962). Now it's even
easier to unearth such howlers from the blogoscenti, since every
misguided pronouncement is archived for the world to see at a moment's
Googling.

Thus if the operating emotion is understood as the pleasure in
Googling up these unfulfilled prophecies, then there's no problem in
using Googlefreude on the
analogy of Schadenfreude as
the joy (freude) in another's
misfortune or harm (schaden). Googleschaden could define
something a bit different — the grief suffered by the victim of the
Google-enabled disclosure. But if the schaden
element is to be preserved, then I agree with the anonymous commenter
on SbaCL that Schadengoogle
seems preferable, since the whole point is to resonate with that
ever-useful German loanword Schadenfreude.

Beyond the semantics of grief and joy, however, Googlefreude works better to my ear
because it more closely follows how English speakers create new
blends out of
lexical material that is from a foreign source or is otherwise
compositionally opaque. Previously I've posted about such blends as Jobdango,
an employment website combining job
with the last two syllables of fandango,
and Infogami,
a Web application combining info
with the last two syllables of origami.
The blend components -dango
and -gami don't actually mean
anything in themselves but are intended to evoke (at least vaguely)
the full words fandango
and origami. I termed this
process "cran-morphing,"
since segments like -dango
and -gami are treated as if
they were combinable
morphemes semantically linked to the fuller words, akin to cran-grape and cran-apple taking on the cran- of cranberry. Quoting myself:

One significant
aspect of cran-morphing is that it completely reanalyzes a segment,
regardless of what semantic content the segment may have had earlier in
its history, whether in English or another originating language. Cheeseburgers and turkeyburgers don't have anything
to do with the inhabitants of a burg, just as Monicagate and Plamegate don't have anything to do
with gates.

With this in mind, it's better to think of Sullivan's Googlefreude not so much as a
straightforward compound combining Google
with the German word freude,
but rather a cran-morphed version of Schadenfreude
with Google replacing the
first two syllables. (It helps that the metrical pattern of the
original word is maintained as well.) Most English speakers who use the
word Schadenfreude do not
actively analyze its composition into the German components schaden + freude. Rather, it's just a long
Germanism with an unusual meaning, a meaning that remains crystallized
in -freude when combined with
other elements like Google.

Another online coinage involving a similar reanalysis of Schadenfreude is Bushenfreude, as used in twoarticles by Slate columnist
Daniel Gross in 2003 and 2004. Like Googlefreude,
Bushenfreude suffers from a
rather weak definition by its coiner. Gross glosses it as the "weird
mix of confusion, annoyance, exhilaration, and
anger" suffered by rich Democrats benefiting from President Bush's tax
cuts. He writes, "They were enjoying their extra income while loathing
its
source — a Republican in the White House and Republican-controlled
Congress." On the face of it, this doesn't seem to have much to do with
the original sense of Schadenfreude,
since there's no joy experienced in the suffering of others. Rather, it
amorphously recalls the mixed emotions of pleasure and pain encompassed
in the German loanword, an evocation that remains even though the first
syllable has been overwritten with Bush.
(Again, it seems important to maintain the metrical pattern of Schadenfreude in creating the
blend.)

There have been other English-language riffs on Schadenfreude that maintain all but
the word's first syllable. There's blondenfreude, defined by the
New York Times' Alessandra Stanley in 2002 as "the glee felt when a
rich,
powerful, and fair-haired business woman stumbles" (Martha Stewart
being Stanley's case in point). Howard Dean's meltdown in the 2004
Democratic primaries inspired Deanenfreude.
Jonah Goldberg of the National Review is partial to Frankenfreude, or "a state of
restrained glee at the failures or setbacks of Al Franken." (That one
handily bridges the two blend elements with a linking -en-.) And Andrew
Sullivan has been down this path before: in an online piece for The
New Republic just before Election Day '04 he used votenfreude, which he defined
as "the assimilation of other voters'
agony." As with his later Googlefreude,
Sullivan was unconcerned that the "agony" segment of the original Schadenfreude had been partially
overwritten, and I doubt he would have considered schadenvote or voteschaden as possible
alternatives. The -(en)freude
segment appears to be crucial for such blends, regardless of whether
the emphasis
is on joy or grief.

Finally, I should note that Sullivan
wasn't the first to come up with the coinage Googlefreude.
Back in January 2004, the blogger Ann
Althouse reported this usage from her son John Althouse Cohen (with a much more straightforward definition than Sullivan's):

They are practicing Googlefraud, and in doing
so they're preventing you from maintaining the feeling you had earlier today: what the Germans call Googlefreude (joy derived from Google).

After all of these X(en)freude blends, it may be time to retire this word-coining mechanism for a while. There ought to be a word for this kind of neologism fatigue... How about slangeweile, combining English slang with German Langeweile 'boredom, ennui'?